Science: The raw fuel of innovation

Blue Sky Views offers commentary by experts on issues related to innovation and entrepreneurship in Chicago.

Talk of innovation is in the air in Chicago. Several universities, including my own, have announced plans to build new centers for innovation. The Innovation Awards drew 1,300 people. Mayor Rahm Emanuel has promised to double the size of the technology industry here in 10 years.

There would be little argument that innovation is crucial to a flourishing city and to the nation, spurring as it does economic growth, job creation, increased tax revenues, and a general improvement in the quality of life.

What do we mean by innovation? A study of innovations and how they came about reveals a complex picture — one in which basic knowledge and understanding is intertwined with creativity and opportunity, as well as a fair degree of luck — and in which innovation is not always a simple linear process connecting basic knowledge to the marketplace, but rather something that can happen at all levels and at all stages of the process.

It is true in many cases that the first spark of innovation is new knowledge based on scientific research, often carried out at universities. But, it is also important to note that the keys to a true innovative culture are the innovators themselves — many of them products of rigorous university programs that educate them broadly and prepare them to take their place in a culture of innovation.

For example, in France, one of the greatest scientists, Louis Pasteur, was engaged in the very practical study of the souring of wine, engaged by the vintners, when he came upon the fundamental notion of microscopic life — bacteria — responsible for many human ills, leading, through his work, to the cure of many of the diseases plaguing mankind. Pasteur had already made his name as an academic scientist which laid the foundation for his seminal discovery. It was Pasteur who said “Opportunity favors the prepared mind,” an apt summation of the connections between education, knowledge and innovation.

Our lives are full of innovations developed from discoveries in basic science. Indeed, Margaret Thatcher — not exactly a fan of academic science — is famously quoted as saying in 1988 that the value of the work of Michael Faraday (1791-1867) — father of electromagnetism — “must today be higher than the capitalization of all the shares on the Stock Exchange.”

More recently, in the mid-twentieth century, are innovations whose origins are, in fact, clearly and firmly grounded in fundamental science, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which combines the deep understanding of atomic physics, electromagnetism and electromagnetic waves, higher mathematics and computation. The genius of the inventors, Paul Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield, was the way in which this disparate knowledge was combined in pursuit of a new tool for imaging the human body.

Thus, while innovation can take place in many ways, and although there are exceptions — Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs — it is likely to be accomplished by people who have the benefit of a rigorous scientific or technological education, who can understand the significance of their ideas to enterprise as a whole and its impact on society.

We need to remove barriers between research entities and private enterprises that are interested in partnerships, and we need more conversation and communication. As a scientist, I and my colleagues also have benefited tremendously from the government support of our research — research driven largely by curiosity and the desire to understand the world around us. This has proven essential to innovation, providing undreamt of ideas and technologies. But we also must strive to break down the boundaries between the pure and applied and the pathways that take science to the marketplace.

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in its recent report ARISE II, points out the pressing need to collaborate and cooperate across the boundaries, not only between the scientific disciplines, or between science and engineering, but across the full spectrum of ingredients that constitute innovation. Here, the universities can play a key role having, as many of them do, not only science and engineering but business, law and entrepreneurship activities and programs which must be combined in new ways to educate our students in the many facets of knowledge demanded by an innovation society.

For IIT’s part, in addition to ongoing programs in which our scientists and engineers are engaged in doing as well as thinking, and exploring the culture of innovation, the new Innovation Center will form a focal point for these collaborative translational and potentially transformational activities.

Dr. Russell Betts is Dean of the College of Science at Illinois Institute of Technology. He earned his Ph.D. and M.S. from the University of Pennsylvania and B.A. and M.A. from Oxford University, and has been a senior physicist with Argonne National Laboratory and vice provost at the University of Illinois at Chicago. IIT’s new Innovation Center is scheduled to begin construction in May 2015 and open in May 2017.